TIFTY TWOFERS: TIFF 2025 REVIEWS
Dust Bunny and Little Amélie both privilege the full, and often messy, experience of early girlhood, be that trying to determine if you have conjured up a real man-eating monster out of your own rampant imagination, or slowly learning the painful lesson that you are not a Goddess among mere mortals.
By Tamar Hanstke
Young girls are one of the more misrepresented demographics in film. There is a darkness within young girls and femmes that is similar to, but distinct from, the darkness within little boys; a darkness that patriarchal systems work to convince us is not there. Bryan Fuller’s Dust Bunny and Maïlys Vallade and Liane-Cho Han’s Little Amélie are two fantastical films that stare headlong into that darkness, providing two fictional girls a rare chance to reveal the chaos lurking in their young minds—and, in the case of Dust Bunny, potentially even manifest some of that internal chaos into reality.
Speaking first on Dust Bunny, this film is notable for being Fuller’s feature film directorial debut after a long-running television career, spanning all-too-short-lived cult classics like Pushing Daisies and Dead Like Me, as well as more popular fare like Hannibal and several of the recent Star Trek shows. As a long-time fan of Fuller’s work, particularly the bittersweet fairytale world of Pushing Daisies, I was both excited to witness his foray into feature filmmaking, as well as relieved to enter a ‘Fuller world’ where I would not have to fear an incomplete ending due to premature cancellation.
I am pleased to report that Dust Bunny effectively melds elements of Fuller’s more recent TV hit Hannibal—a starring role for Mads Mikkelsen, as well as themes of living a double life and engaging in secret criminal enterprises—with elements of his earlier, more whimsical work, such as Pushing Daisies. During the post-film Q&A, I heard at least one audience member comment that Dust Bunny was the most beautiful film they had seen at TIFF 2025, and I wholeheartedly agree. The film features a paradoxically vivid yet muted colour palette and, characteristic of Fuller, lavish production design in which every inch of the frame is filled with unusual visual details—including many distinctive props and costumes that were noteworthy enough to inspire several lively conversations during the Q&A (Fuller, of course, had them all designed especially for the film).
Most exciting, however, was Fuller’s successful venture into a family-oriented project with a leading child actor, a young girl named Sophie Sloan. The film is intentionally evocative of family films from the 1980s and early ‘90s, such as Gremlins, The Goonies, or the animated work of Don Bluth (The Land Before Time, The Secret of Nimh, etc.) which are films that could certainly be enjoyed by the whole family, yet provide the youngest family members with age-appropriate opportunities to confront challenging, or even scary, ideas and imagery that is rarely seen in media for children today in the mid-2020s (though the AI slop showing up in YouTube’s algorithm for child viewers can be considered scary in an entirely different way…). Boasting a PG rating, Dust Bunny will surely strike a nostalgic chord for those who grew up with those classics from the 1980s, and has the potential to live on as a contemporary, fun yet scary family film for a new generation of children to look back on fondly in their adult years.
This child-friendly dimension of the film is made even more wholesome by additional context provided by Fuller in the Q&A: It was essential to him to protect his child actress during filming, and so, in the spirit of the recent (and greatly overdue) practice of filmmakers employing intimacy coordinators, Fuller instead employed what he terms a “child life coordinator”. Specifically, this child life coordinator—herself a former child actress—remained with young leading actress Sophie Sloan all through filming, ensuring that for every minute Sloan was not actively filming, she was leading a life as close as possible to that of any average young girl of her age. With our increasing awareness of the horrific and near-universal exploitation of children in the film and television industries, it was a relief to learn that Fuller ensured as positive an experience for Sloan as possible.
I also believe that Fuller’s attentiveness to Sloan behind the scenes pays off in dividends in her final performance in the film. While she plays a wise-beyond-her-years precocious child, of which there are numerous examples in cinema, she remains recognizably a child who is merely adopting an often clumsy effect of real wisdom. When the action comes to a real head, she does not improbably find a way to save the day, but rather relies on her unlikely guardian figure (played by Mikkelsen) to protect and care for her, as any child should be able to. When Sloan is taking the lead, as in the inciting incident wherein she seeks out Mikkelsen to kill a monster under her bed that she claims has eaten her parents, the audience is given the gift of a real look into the unspoken horrors of girlhood. Whether this little girl really has a monster under her bed or not, a probing question for much of the film, we are never in doubt that her fear is legitimate and worthy of the audience’s belief and investment.
Little Amélie shares some unexpected parallels with Dust Bunny, including its visual splendour—though in this case animated, rather than live-action—and in the way it explores the darkness hiding within young girls. In the opening to this film, the audience is provided with narration by the titular Amélie, describing her circumstances immediately before and in the aftermath of her birth. Amélie believes herself to be a god, possessing unimaginable power—if only she, trapped in the pre-verbal body of a human infant, could get all of the lowly adult humans around her to understand what she is saying. Her narration is initially presented as objective, leading to a strange cognitive dissonance as the viewer attempts to understand exactly who, or what, the narrator is. After some time, the visuals of the film begin to provide gentle contradictions of the narration, and thereby greater narrative clarity, as images of Amélie, who is in reality a crying infant, are juxtaposed with the all-knowing omnipotence of her narration.
Watching Little Amélie, I was reminded of the premise of a particularly maligned movie that I nonetheless watched incessantly as a child, Baby Geniuses. In that film, scientists discover that human babies are the world’s greatest geniuses up until the moment when they learn to talk, at which point they forget everything. Despite this absurd conceit, paired with some not-very-good effects simulating older voices emanating from the infant actors, something was appealing for child-me in seeing this ultimate power fantasy of some of the tiniest and helpless beings on the planet actually possessing this incredible, unharnessable ability that grown adults can only envy. Here, this same power fantasy emerges more artfully and metaphorically, as Amélie’s rather Freudian superiority complex is slowly dismantled through learning about the world and bonding with the people around her. It is refreshing to see a film that is so resolutely told from the perspective of a young girl, one who is selfish and self-serving and careless of the needs and wants of others—all qualities that are regularly denied to girls, of any age, in film. This emphasis on Amélie’s complex perspective is, as mentioned, backed up by stunning, often abstract animation that allows the viewer to see the world through Amélie’s eyes—yet, this is not merely a whimsical and stereotypical gaze of childlike wonder, but one that is also regularly witness to conflict grief, and even a dramatic moment of ego death as Amelie suffers through a particularly upsetting personal tragedy.
Ultimately, Dust Bunny and Little Amélie both privilege the full, and often messy, experience of early girlhood, be that trying to determine if you have conjured up a real man-eating monster out of your own rampant imagination, or slowly learning the painful lesson that you are not a Goddess among mere mortals. These complicated, insightful representations reveal how many nuances of girlhood continue to go unexplored, and are ripe for continued re-examination in contemporary cinema.
Pink Asparagus 
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